


what you did in the dark

by charleybradburies



Series: sympathy in the form of you (crawling into bed with me) [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Confrontations, Coping, Daughters, F/M, Family Dynamics, Father-Daughter Relationship, Fatherhood, Female Character In Command, Heavy Angst, House Stark, Lost Love, Love Confessions, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Not Canon Compliant, POV Gendry, Post-Loss, Presumed Dead, Queen Arya, Sexual Content, Twins, Unplanned Pregnancy, War, Wolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-28
Updated: 2014-12-28
Packaged: 2018-03-03 23:01:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2891312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charleybradburies/pseuds/charleybradburies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not her love, never worth her love. There will never be a man alive worth that.</p><p>At least, that's what he tells himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what you did in the dark

_She doesn’t understand,_ he tells himself. _She doesn’t understand what it’s like to need to fight to have a family. She’s always had a family. She’s always had someone to love her, to care for her. She’s angry at me now, but soon enough she’ll make it to the Wall and to her bastard brother, she’ll find her sister, she’ll find her wolf, and this won’t matter. She won’t care that I’ve left her when she’s got her family back. And if she does…then maybe I’ll be worth something by then. Worth her time. Not her love, never worth her love. There will never be a man alive worth that. And if there were, it would never be a blacksmith, let alone a bastard._

At least, that’s what he tells himself. He repeats it to himself like a prayer, over and over and over. He does not deserve her.

When he tells her he’s leaving and she screams and screams and hits him and shoves him and screams even more. When he screams back, asking what good it would do her for him to stay, and her lips tremble like he’d asked a question he should have known how to answer. When she comes to meet him in the armory for the last time and her eyes are red and teary and she can barely speak and he wants little more than to reach out for her and kiss all of that pain away but he doesn’t. _He does not deserve her._

He says it like a prayer, and he doesn’t do or say anything that he shouldn’t.

But she finds him, that last night, when he’s alone, taking the only time he’s allotted himself to think of her as anything but a princess, a lord’s daughter, the daughter of Winterfell. Her eyes are angry but she’s in nothing but a nightdress and her hair is cascading down her shoulders and she’s so _fucking_ beautiful and she walks up to him and tells him that if they’re going to say goodbye at all then they ought to do it right, and then she’s kissing him, and before he can stop himself, before he even has a chance to think - _you won’t be stealin’ no kisses from a princess, you wouldn’t be my family, you were a lord’s daughter, you lived in a castle, milady milady milady_ \- he’s picking her up and holding her and her legs are gripping him so tightly and _gods_ she’s dripping wet and she kisses him so hard and they bury themselves in each other and it all feels so perfect that nothing else in the world could possibly matter. 

He doesn’t see her the next morning. He and his Brothers leave, and he thinks of her, and every part of his body hurts. 

None of them mention her, not around him, but he knows that they speak of her, and when the lady who had been Lady Catelyn comes to them and asks about her, they look to him to see whether he will endure their stories. He’d like to think that they don’t know, that all of them believe him that she was his friend, but the rumor reaches them that she’s been wedded to the bastard of Bolton, and though he contests that it can’t possibly be true, he feels like a part of him has died, and the Lady Stoneheart looks right through him when he begins to choke on his words. 

She sees his father in him the first time she looks into his eyes, and she professes him a bastard of the King Robert Baratheon, gives him the name of Waters, and insists upon using it. He is the only Brother that she speaks to freely, though he doesn’t think she says anything particularly different. It is simply that he sees Lady Catelyn within her, rather than the monster many of the others seem to see. Gendry holds his hand out to help her sit down when Harwin is not at her side, and she comes to watch him make armor, knowing that he will go on with his business and not expect a thing from her. He is comfortable with silence, and they form an understanding.

Their Mother Merciless never answers to her former names, not until her children find her, the Young Wolf and the Lady of the Eyrie, armies and wolves at their heels. Little like the siblings Arya had described, yet precisely like them all the same, they lead their pack through the North, and soon enough Winterfell again belongs to the wolves. 

The Lady Sansa speaks to the Mother Merciless and she whispers to her - just that, “Mother,” and as much patience as she has, it does not keep her from revealing her despair - and the Mother reaches out for her again. “My Daughter,” she says eventually, with the whisper of a voice that remains within her, and a tear graces her cheek. 

The flayed men try to fight, but all their effort is in vain. The only victory the Starks do not have is their Princess. The woman that had been said to be her sobs, she who had been married to the Bolton bastard in Arya’s name, but Sansa knows both her sister and this woman, her old friend, and it is not Arya, but Jeyne Poole, whose father had been steward to Sansa’s father. 

When the other son, the true Heir to Winterfell, the brother who cannot walk, returns, he brings with him a pair of twins, a boy and a girl, barely four years of age, beautiful and bold and stubborn, hair as black as night, the boy’s eyes blue and the girl’s eyes the same grey that Gendry recalls Arya’s to have been, and the Mother holds them as though they had come to her young enough still to be babes at her breast. 

The Lady implores her brother to reveal their mother’s name, but for many moons he refuses, until Aryanna begins to insist on calling him Father and the Lord Brandon must tell her that he is not her father for true, for it was instead his sister and not a lover of his who had given she and Robben life, and that she had died beyond the Wall, in childbed, just as many years past as they had aged. She had been alone and Meera had heard her scream, and searched high and low for her only to find her at her final breath. She had known only that it had been Arya of House Stark because she looked precisely an unkempt variant of the Lady Lyanna in the paintings that Meera remembered. Meera had kissed the woman’s icy forehead, and cried as she pulled the children into her arms and brought them back with her, and she and Osha had nursed them as well as they could manage. 

The answer brings no one peace.

Arya of House Stark is not here, and Bran continues to treat them as his own, even now that they know that they are not. It is so much easier for everyone to pretend, and Jorrel the first trueborn Stark child of their generation grows up believing that the boy who holds him in his youngest days and the girl who teaches him how to wield his wooden sword properly are his siblings. Bran sighs when he calls them such, and Meera presses sympathetic kisses to her husband’s cheeks, weaving stories for her son of how his grandmother went to battle in the form of a fierce wolf and the scars at her neck had begun as bites from lions that had mistakenly thought her prey. 

She tries to tell him the stories with a proud smile, but even her soft cheerfulness heals few wounds.

The wolves pace their castle, and they howl, and Gendry works their smithy. 

Aryanna attaches herself to him, and it should bother him, but it never does. She wants to know what everything does and how every sort of sword is forged and how to hold them, and though she’s just a little thing when she starts to hang about, only a girl of six, he narrates every thing he can spare for her, and on her and her brother’s seventh name day they both find themselves the owners of small, slender swords. Elated, she wraps her arms around him in a hug and thanks him nigh on a hundred times, and when her brother calls her Arry and entreats her to duel with him, Gendry’s heart catches in his throat. He stands next to Rickon, and watches them play. They fight many times, and she wins all but twice. 

One day soon after that, Sansa comes to the armory, sending the girl away when she arrives. Aryanna protests momentarily, but leaves with a huff anyways, and Sansa leans against the wall. She stays silent for a few minutes, watching him work as her mother and her sister oft had done. 

“We’ve trusted you, you know.” Her voice is harrowing, almost frightening. “Yet you have been lying to us. You and Arya were not friends, were you?”

“We were.”

“You and Arya being friends does not explain how she birthed a son who looks more and more like you with each passing day.”

He sets down his hammer and grits his teeth, and there is silence between them for a little while longer.

“Once,” he admits. “Only once.”

He doesn’t wish to speak more, but the look in Sansa’s eyes lets him know that he must.

“The night before I left. She came to me, she kissed me, we made love, I never saw her again.” 

He tries to say as little as possible, but his sorrow and his fury rise in his throat regardless. 

“Yes, I loved her. No, we were never lovers. I was wrong to love her and wrong to leave her, and I can’t change that I did both.”

His voice cracks, and Sansa bows her head, allowing a few tears to come from her eyes. 

“You still love her,” Sansa says very softly, after what feels like a very long time, much more a statement than a question.

“With all my heart,” he concedes, meeting her eyes. She purses her lips very hard, and leaves without another word.

They never speak of it again, not directly, nor does any other Stark ever question him on the subject, but they all know. 

The Lord Commander comes to visit and he studies Gendry with harsh eyes after Aryanna, nigh a maid of five-and-ten, calls him Father in front of him. This bastard brother has reason to be harsher, and Gendry tells him that he knows as such, as he and Arya had been the closest of them all, and the only conversation he and Jon Snow ever have alone is less a conversation than a competition between the two as to which of them can speak of Arya the longest without crying. Neither of them last particularly long, so they talk very little.

Another war’s begun, one above the Wall, between a growing force of Others and the Night’s Watch, but it’s far more complicated than that. There’s a wildling Queen, leading not only a massive legion of Free Folk against the Others and the Wights, but an entire pack of direwolves, direwolves who have been tearing the limbs from the risen dead and baring their teeth at any Ranger fool enough to come within shooting distance of their main camp. Their howls have been sending shivers down the spines of Snow’s men for over a year, even though Ghost always answers the wolves’ calls, and most of the men of the Watch have grown more at ease with him. 

A few of the Kings-above-the-Wall had sought to strike down the Queen of Wolves, as she has come to be known, after she had started to rise to power, but each met their demise in the attempt. What little knowledge is had of her by the Watch includes that she is slender and somewhat small of stature, with dirt brown hair and fearsome eyes - the only two accounts known to Jon differ in their opinion on their color, one man believing them grey, the other blue. She raises her own voice to howl with the direwolves, and leads her people into battle against the White Walkers and the wights upon the back of one. 

Queen of Wolves, Mother of Wolves, the She-Wolf. It matters not what they call her, but he knows what she is. They all do, even though not one of them will say the name she had before. 

A young man of House Tyrell comes in hopes of Aryanna’s hand, following a letter with the same request, which had been met with a challenge: she would marry only if he was able to best her in a fight. He hands her a rose, and she rolls her eyes at him, entirely unimpressed. She keeps her word, though, and takes up her sword against him. 

He leaves unsatisfied and humiliated, and she tells Bran not to allow any other man to entertain the idea of marrying her. He argues with her, and everyone else argues with her, and Gendry doesn’t even know what to say about any of it because he can’t help but see Arya when he looks at her and it’s all too surreal. Gendry shakes his head so hard that his headache lasts for days. Or maybe that’s the drinking. Either way, it hurts like hell.

Fortunately for her, the war against the Others is more pressing, and the might of Winterfell is turned towards that conflict instead. She insists on going North with Rickon and Gendry and Robben when Bran sends them to aid the Watch, and none of them have energy to spare on arguing with her any further, and she rides at their sides the whole of the way, bannermen and soldiers following behind. And _gods,_ she looks like her mother. More often then not, the only way Gendry’s able to remind himself that she isn’t is because both children inherited his height, and are precisely the same height - save for the days that Sansa was able to get Aryanna into higher-heeled shoes - and only a couple of inches shorter than Gendry himself. 

The twins, while of the same height as one another, are not of the same skill, and just as Arya had always managed to best Gendry, so Aryanna bests Robben, as well as every other man who dares to set himself against her, a point which has long since been a great source of pride. Only her uncle Jon achieves victory, and only once, in front of no one, to teach a lesson. 

“I, too, had once won all my fights. That alone did not make me a champion, let alone a leader. Respect is earned, not won,” he tells her, and she blushes, an occurrence that has happened so few times one could count them on a single hand. But she takes his point to heart, and sobers.

The spearwives who come to deliver messages from their audacious Queen hear that there is a woman among the ranks at Castle Black, and while Lord Commander Snow is quick to tell them she is not of the Watch but of Winterfell, they demand that she be the one to whom they speak, and he relents. But one of them startles at seeing her when she comes forth, swearing that she looked just the image of their own leader as she was a number of years before, and the suspicion is confirmed.

“Take me to see her,” Aryanna exhorts the next time she speaks to them. “We wish to fight alongside you, no more, no less. Let me speak to her - she will see that this is for true. I promise you.”

“The Queen-beyond-the-Wall does not take orders. Especially not from kneelers,” one of them sneers, but she is not swayed.

“This is no order. This is a plea, for the sake of all the people of Westeros, free and kneeling and in between, every one.”

They leave without giving an answer, and Castle Black stands particularly vigilant for a number of days, before they return early one morning.

“You must have a surety. Bring one of your men with you, unarmed. She will speak to you together.”

Jon and Rickon both begin to move to hand their weapons to their immediate subordinates, but Aryanna turns back and looks to Gendry, calling him by his surname, and he goes to stand beside her.

They arrive at a set of gates as the sun is threatening to set, and it’s then that Gendry sees that ‘camp’ was very much an inadequate description: this settlement of wolves and subjects is practically a city. Had someone told him there were a port on the far side, with trade to Essos that helped it prosper, he may well have believed them, had he not known that the nearest offshoot of The Gorge was much too narrow to carry a ship. 

There are many wolves, and many women, but few men, and Gendry is not at all surprised, although the spearwives seem surprised that neither he nor his daughter shy from any of the direwolves about the area. There are more than at Winterfell, for true, and they are not familiar, but Aryanna is the blood of the direwolf, and Gendry their unparalleled ally. 

One of the spearwives jogs ahead as they approach a cave on the edge of the camp. The cave is brightly lit with candles and torches, and a grey direwolf lies at the entrance, though it stands to allow the spearwife to step inside and shout. Her words are inaudible, but the rest of their group grows nearer, and they are not turned away but allowed to enter. The spearwives leave the pair of kneelers at the cave’s entrance with superficially respectful nods, and the direwolf leads them further inside.

“You must be Nymeria, then,” Gendry says when she looks back at him with her golden eyes, and she cocks her head at him, letting him pat her on the head.

“You were dead,” comes an astonished, familiar voice a matter of seconds later, at best the most uncertain he’s ever heard it.

“Sorry to disappoint, milady.”

Once the battles have ended, the rivers run red and silver and the sky is black with smoke for days, but the humans and the wolves feast and rejoice as they are able. Wounds healed and forts rebuilt, bonds and swords alike are forged by the unification against their common enemy, one which is, for the time being, defeated. 

Some wildlings move into the castles of the Wall, agreeing to aid the Watch, and some of the bannermen come to fancy some of Arya’s women and move beyond the Wall. Arya kisses Gendry in front of everyone when she pleases, and aside from some hoots and hollers every once in a while, there is little reaction. They lay together every night, and even Jon stops minding after a fortnight. Nymeria lays at the foot of their bed, and she stalks after Gendry when they are separate. 

Aryanna is pregnant before the war’s been over six moons, but she won’t tell them the father’s name, mostly because she isn’t sure which lover is the father, and even Arya shakes her head at her, though when the child comes, she spends nearly as much time with him as her daughter does. Robben and one of the spearwives are quickly courting each other, and they slink away one evening with Arya to take vows by the heart tree in the Haunted Forest, taking up residence in the chambers Arya had held while Queen that very night, and they bring another child into the world soon after. 

There is travel and laughter and snow and love, and the North, all of the North, is alive and joyous with the music of wolves.


End file.
